Creative design talks directly to people’s heart. Creative designers must be equipped with software tools that enable them to easily craft and adjust the product's emotional content through their designs,while collaborating with engineering to ensure proper coverage of product functional scope.

Successful products in the market are usually those with designs that elicit positive emotional response from their consumers. CATIA is at the service of creative designers and their creativity. Whether starting ideation in 3D from scratch or from 2D sketches, industrial designers can manipulate shapes with unrivaled freedom and take advantage of a true creativity accelerator to explore more ideas in the early conceptual phase. CATIA fully addresses the Automotive Class-A process with a solution for surface refinement that integrates industry leading ICEM surfacing technologies. By combining the V6 technology strengths, which include knowledge capture-and-reuse paradigm, it delivers a powerful and intuitive suite of tools for modeling, analyzing and visualizing aesthetic and ergonomic shapes for the highest Class-A surface quality.

CATIA Imagine & Shape delivers ultra-fast modeling technology so that industrial designers can embrace styling creation directly in the CATIA design environment. It introduces a revolutionary way of designing products, by enabling any user to simply and quickly transform an idea into 3D. This new approach, based on exact subdivision surfaces, is unique to the CAD market.

In addition, designers can interactively visualize their concepts in real-time and produce photo-realistic renderings so that their team members can visualize their ideas. Export in STL format is possible for rapid prototyping. Ultimately, this allows design teams to decide earlier in the virtual stage of development, so they don’t waste time or money on expensive prototypes, production resources, and product launch activities.

Sketch integration

CATIA Imagine & Shape allows the integration of stylists' work (such as Photoshop 2D Sketches) into the CATIA 3D environment, as the design reference for 3D modeling. It provides an intuitive toolset to calibrate the working environment. The user will first position and scale the image in 3D, then use the curve and surfacing tools to build the geometry over the sketches.

Dedicated to aesthetical shape creation for conceptual design, Imagine & Shape introduces very new modeling concepts and makes 3D accessible for designers. This industrial design software combines powerful technology, based on subdivision surfaces, with a simple user interface. This new paradigm, similar to clay modeling, allows non-CAD specialists to simply and rapidly create very complex shapes. Users can explore many different design variations in only a few seconds. This technology enables users to define and control a shape with a mesh to go on to easily deform the shape locally and globally. The created surfaces are exacts and could be opened or closed, as well as support sharp edges. The connections between surfaces are G2. Moreover, this technology enables surface creation that is compliant with any CATIA V6 application.

CATIA Imagine & Shape enables designers to interactively create realistic renderings in real-time. They can dynamically create and manipulate materials, lights and environments and immediately view the result of any modification. Plus, it’s possible to generate high-quality photo-realistic images based on industry leading NVIDIA® last-generation rendering software component.

Export STL files for rapid prototyping machines

CATIA Imagine & Shape enables the designer to quickly and accurately create meshes by tessellating CAD data. It allows the import of existing STL files to display the mesh. The product offers advanced tools to improve the quality of meshes by locally editing triangles. The meshes can be exported as a standard binary STL file for rapid prototyping machines.